CONCRETE_OLYMPUS_

I spent a long time in churches growing up.  Raised as Roman Catholic, mass was a weekly experience. The Irish priests of our church had a particular tone of voice: low, slow and sombre. During sermons it seemed that they were deliberately gradually becoming quieter and slower - lulling us each into a state of meditative boredom before they’d eventually shout the creed at us for us all to stand up and join in with, after wiping the stupor from the corner of our mouths. During those frozen moments, I always remember looking up at the ceiling of the church. The ceiling seemed a mile tall, with rows of arches like an overturned galleon. It was just timber and plaster, but I always imagined our prayers and thoughts getting caught up in the crooks of those arches like lost helium balloons. Those tall vaulted ceilings confirmed that God lived in the sky and that this church had managed to capture part of that sky to assure us God’s company.  We were taught about the omni-presence of...

I walked to the Bouca Housing estate on a November Sunday morning past beautiful streets of townhouses where derelict buildings stood aside modernly renovated ones.  The derelict buildings weren’t boarded up - their windows glassless, the peeling shutters wide open and the doors ajar but for the small amount a padlock would allow them to open. Inside was darkness, collapse, fragments of ownership and on their doorsteps there was the occasion person sitting folded. You enter the Bouca Housing estate through a moment of pastel modernity - a hidden stairwell of weathered yellow and red railings, geometrically punctured by rectangles of light. The shadows of old people coming home with groceries past in the stairwells above. After taking lots of photos, I enjoyed just sitting in the middle of it. It was probably only around 10 or 11am . It was late November, but was warm (for a ginger man).  It amused me to think of sitting here on a Sunday morning at 10am a thousand miles from th...

I’m not sure what drew me to Tallinn.  There is a triptych of Estonia-Latvia-Lithuania: three countries locked together like three drawers of the same cabinet. Throughout history, this was once part of a huge Lithuanian empire stretching into the south of Europe. Vikings also swept south as far as modern day Turkey, soothing their sunburn as they sailed. But in modern times, these states have been squeezed tightly together with the external pressures of Prussia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Europe, and Russia.  When you see that Tallinn is a short ferry ride from Helsinki, and that the Finns travel over to Tallinn for the “cheap” alcohol, you see that Estonia is somewhere between Eastern Europe and Scandinavia.  I travelled through streets of yellow timber homes, beautifully weathered green. There are artisanal coffee shops and industrial areas converted into art galleries and pottery shops, but there are also market stall tables covered in rusting army knives and antique shops...

I was really lucky to travel to Moscow a lot from 2007 to 2017.  The drive from Domodedevo airport was a melee of matchbox Lada Riga’s with windows gaffer taped shut, soviet-era trucks caked grey with decades of exhaust fumes and blacked out sports cars all weaving in and out of a motor way where lanes didn’t mean anything.  Outside the window, miles of broad-shouldered grey tower blocks queued into the distance. We drove passed windowless shops with fur-wrapped babushkas heaving open iron doors. The neon lights of petrol stations provided the only colour in the white and grey.  Arriving at a housing estate of identical five floor apartment blocks, I entered a wardrobe of a lift lined with different colours of chewing gum and made our way up to a hallway of heavy duty doors - most lined with a heavy leather-like padding. Every building and every room was formidable and impenetrable. The only thing Russians really fear is the cold. From the sixties to the eighties, res...